A Comprehensive Guide to English Grammar and its Application to Fictional Writing

[soup_alex]

Ah, yootoob! Last refuge of the intelligentsia/cultural élite...

I almost forgot to ask, Owen: does the "grocer's apostrophe" exist on that side of the pond? Here in the ewekay we're working on a way to turn them into renewable fuels (that is, the country is rife with stray "apostrophe's").

[Owen Glyndwr]

Nope, people in the U.S. are probably just as bad the the British. Perhaps moreso, Americans are very stubborn, and don't appreciate this whole concept of "rules" telling them how to write things.

I'd just like to mention that Truss's first and second chapters deal extensively with those problems. In fact in the second chapter, she wrote page after page of examples of people using apostrophes improperly.

[Cute Wolf]

save this page, and study it for my next TOEFL test....
Good work, very much thanks......

[Macilrille]

Its like... enlightening to finally meet an American that actually cares about the English language. being Danish I detest American English and try as much as I can to use the language used in The United Kingdom. Good to see some Americans care.

Now I said "like" for the first time in my life (well, wrote actually, but...), I expect to be followed around and corrected ;-)

[Cimon]

Its like... enlightening to finally meet an American that actually cares about the English language. being Danish I detest American English and try as much as I can to use the language used in The United Kingdom. Good to see some Americans care.

More Americans care than you think. In fact, for some of us (like me and, apparently, Owen), the popular use of the English language in this country is seen as absolutely atrocious. I don't mean to suggest that Americans should use British English; the two languages are similar, but have diverged enough to be distinct in many ways. Still, a little straightening up of American grammar would behoove us all.

[Ibrahim]

As they say on Youtube, "dis is te Inretnet not f!%*#(g english clas bitch dont tel me gramer!"

or tell them how to spell. they can spell the word "car", even if their lives depended on it. depend on it.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Great stuff, Owen. Keep it up!

[Macilrille]

Cimon
Owen

[Gaivs]

Hey, at least you don't see me running around with a sharpie correcting grammatically incorrect road signs, or do you?

Whatever the case, you better not say "like", or I'll follow you around, and correct you on everything you say! (It used to be a bad habit of mine)

You forgot to use a full stop at the end of your sentence.

[Owen Glyndwr]

You forgot to use a full stop at the end of your sentence.

Are you referring to the parenthetical aside? If that is the case, then yes I did forget.

[Tellos Athenaios]

People who butcher grammar tend to commit the sin of upsetting the word order and/or tend to include joker verbs. [Guilty as charged.]

[Owen Glyndwr]

There also tend to be a lot of confusion regarding words that sound very similar, but are in fact completely different:

there
their
they're

its
it's

affect
effect

good
well

who
whom

whose
who's

etc.

[Juvenal]

This is a modern affliction, brought to us by the ubiquity of automated spell-checkers (curse them!)

In days gone by, people had to proof-read what they had written before it was (expensively) committed to public view. But now, when the spell-checker gives your prose a clean bill of health, you are subtly tempted to assume that it actually is what you intended to write and to not bother reading what is really there.

Sadly, even if your magnum opus doesn't have any words underlined in red, you cannot then draw the conclusion that it is without error.

In my experience, spelling checkers cause two types of problem: They fail to highlight use of the wrong variant of a word (there/their etc.), and they also fail to draw your attention to missing words.

On many occasions I have finished a paragraph, then on reviewing it, while still basking in the internal wonder of the idea I was trying to convey, found to my horror that I had missed out whole phrases as my mind raced on ahead of my typing.

By the way, great guide , I hope you are going to extend it with tips on how to write clearly at a scale larger than the sentence (like how to organise paragraphs etc.).

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

I have a bad tendency towards the repetitive use of words in text, mostly because proof reading isn't really one of my talents.

[Owen Glyndwr]

This is a modern affliction, brought to us by the ubiquity of automated spell-checkers (curse them!)

In days gone by, people had to proof-read what they had written before it was (expensively) committed to public view. But now, when the spell-checker gives your prose a clean bill of health, you are subtly tempted to assume that it actually is what you intended to write and to not bother reading what is really there.

Sadly, even if your magnum opus doesn't have any words underlined in red, you cannot then draw the conclusion that it is without error.

In my experience, spelling checkers cause two types of problem: They fail to highlight use of the wrong variant of a word (there/their etc.), and they also fail to draw your attention to missing words.

On many occasions I have finished a paragraph, then on reviewing it, while still basking in the internal wonder of the idea I was trying to convey, found to my horror that I had missed out whole phrases as my mind raced on ahead of my typing.

By the way, great guide , I hope you are going to extend it with tips on how to write clearly at a scale larger than the sentence (like how to organise paragraphs etc.).

I most likely will eventually, given that I can find the time of course. I find writing these chapters to be very time consuming. I don't know why, but it seems to take me well over an hour or two to write them (the last one was written over the course of three days, and took about 4 or 5 hours to do cumulatively, if I recall correctly), probably a combination of the length of the work, and all the fact checking I end up doing.

[desert]

Don't forget the lay-lie dilemma. No matter how many times I read about it, I can never remember the correct usage!

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

Me too. No matter how many times I check, I seem to get lay-lie and affect-effect wrong.

I also never use whom. I think whom has basically become archaic in my local dialect, anyways.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Don't forget the lay-lie dilemma. No matter how many times I read about it, I can never remember the correct usage!

IIRC:

Lie -> Lay -> Laid
That one lay somewhere beneath a layer which now lies on top of everything.
Lie -> Lied -> Lied:
Here's one for you: can you lie you lied?
Lay -> Laid -> Laid:
Lay something back where it laid before.

But yes, I think this is probably the most difficult one. I try to use put instead, can't go wrong with that one.

[Ibn-Khaldun]

Me too. No matter how many times I check, I seem to get lay-lie and affect-effect wrong.

I also never use whom. I think whom has basically become archaic in my local dialect, anyways.

And you are from an English speaking country! Try to imagine what us, who don't speak/write/read English everyday, must feel!

[SwissBarbar]

Yes, imagine what burden is laid upon us, who do not speak English. We learn from you. It affects us all, to whom we speak. What an effect could it have, if even native speakers have troubles.

To be serious, I also have problems with lay - laid

[desert]

Everyone does. Apparently some grammarians have just said "**** it" and decided that it doesn't matter anymore.

[Juvenal]

I don't want English to be simplified. It is the very complexity and ambiguity which give it richness.

This was all a happy accident. English has acquired a huge number of loan words from other languages over the centuries, and as a result many concepts often have several words that should theoretically be interchangeable. But thanks to the magic of usage, those words have acquired unique overtones and subtle shades of meaning. As a result, English poetry has an embarrassment of riches to draw upon (although it can be hard to find rhymes at times [clearly not this time though]).

English has always been a mongrel language, Germanic roots, first overlaid with Latin and French, and then peppered with a fusillade of words from all the languages of Empire. It may be frustrating because of all the broken syntactic rules, but it is also endlessly fascinating.

[soup_alex]

Nicely done, SwissBarbar!

I used to be pretty slick when it came to affect/effect (this was in my early teens, for example), but my ability to distinguish one from the other seems to have taken a thumping of late. I've never felt very confident in my grasp of rules, and it can even take me a few seconds to recognise whether a word is e.g. an adjective or a verb (or something else altogether) in a particular context—my skill in English (can you hear that? That's my trumpet, that is) is something I've long considered attributable to intuition; e.g. I'm fairly competent at identifying the worst kinds of errors in other people's usage and avoiding them (errors, not people, ho ho) in my own, but bloody useless at explaining why for example you should not say:

"LESS EMISSIONS, NOT LESS STYLE!"


(It has just occurred to me, actually, that the problem with the above is that Mr. and Mrs. Vauxhall (or whichever car it was) are using the plural form of "emission". Perhaps they reasoned that the more correct "fewer emissions, not less style" wouldn't sound as catchy, or that by using poor grammar they create a stronger affinity with the type of idiot consumer who believes that buying a new, "greener" car is the best way to save the planet?)

[Owen Glyndwr]

"Less Emissions, not less style!"

There are some major errors in the sentence that I can see presently.

1. Subject: The sentence has no subject. It has a noun, "emissions", however emissions here, I would assume is being used as a direct object and not a subject, and it's the same thing with style.
2. Verb: There is no verb in the sentence, not one. Let's identify the parts of speech of this sentence, shall we? Less can be used as a noun, adjective, adverb, or preposition, however in this case, it's being used as an adjective to describe "emissions", and style. "Emissions" and "style", as I said, are nouns which I would assume are being used as the D.O. of a nonexistant verb. "Not" is an adverb as well. So there's a problem there, isn't there? We have a fragment. Now, fixing it can be a bit tricky, as in normal speech we wouldn't use a subject here, but, in order to be grammatically correct, every English sentence (or at least most) demands a subject.

"One should make less emissions and not less style."

1. Notice that I added a subject (One) to the first part of the sentence, as well as a verb (make). This turns the first statement into an independent clause, and with it, we can now make the sentence grammatically correct. Also notice that I added a conjunction (and) and removed a comma. Since we are combining an independent clause and a dependent clause, rather than two independent clauses, no comma is required.


However there is one more problem, and is, for most, probably the focus of the sentence. One of the hardest things to understand in the English language is the difference between the words less and fewer. Less is used with mass nouns, whereas fewer is used with counting nouns. Although most use less for emissions, it is a counting noun, and as such, should be used with fewer. Style, however, is a mass noun, and thusly less can stay where it is.

"One should make fewer emissions and not less style."

Of couse you can see why the phrase is grammtically correct; it doesn't sound as catchy, does it? Well that's how it should be!

[Juvenal]

"One should make fewer emissions and not less style."

It still doesn't quite make sense, how can you "make... less style"? I believe we need to add something for style to be a property of. The simplest adjustment to the original fragment I can think of is this:

"Produce fewer emissions without having less style."

I have expressed it as a command, does it have everything required of a sentence?

[Owen Glyndwr]

Yes, you are right, the word "not" doesn't make sense in the context, as does make.

[desert]

As with lay/lie, there is a group of grammarians who advocate removing the distinction between less and fewer.

Hey, you could use it as an answer:

"Ok, so it's a. more cookies and b. less style..."

"Less emissions, not less style!"

[soup_alex]

As with lay/lie, there is a group of grammarians who advocate removing the distinction between less and fewer.

"Urge to kill: growing!"

I think the lesson here is that advertising executives (or whatever they want to call themselves) are pretty damn stupid.
(oh, and it was a Volvo ad, by the way, not Vauxhall)

[alatar]

I can see where this guide would be useful (for non-native speakers who are trying to write a AAR) but I think pestering someone for minor mistakes is a bit excessive.

[Owen Glyndwr]

The grammarian lifestyle not something I am advocating, nor is this guide intended to be a grammarian's bible. This guide is solely intended to assist up and coming writers with the improvement of grammar in their stories, thereby improving the "readability" of the story overall.